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#NudgeYourWorld Part IIII: Failure & Death (Fun!)

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The Antidote by Oliver Burkeman

It’s time for the final part of my #NudgeYourWorld adventure for Canongate. I’ve spent the past week reading and living by the learnings within Oliver Burkeman’s The Antidote.

(Click through to catch up on Part I, Part II and Part III.)

Chapters 7 and 8 cover failure and death – but don’t let that put you off!

 

Chapter 7 – The Museum of Failure

Burkeman opens his treatise on failure with a Japanese term, mono no aware, which roughly translates as ‘the pathos of things’, and a visit to The Museum of Failure. The museum is a supermarket-like space wherein lies a collection of failed products from the US consumer market. Failure is everywhere, but we prefer not to confront it. Burkeman uses examples from the museum to illustrate this point.

Our aversion to confronting failure also leads to a distorted view of causes of success. We under-sample failure in our conversations about success, and this also leads to survivor bias – only hearing about the guys who succeeded, when they share a lot of similarities with those who fail.

The problem is that we now apply the term ‘failure’ to the person whose project failed, not just to the failed project. You’re no longer a person with a failed product, but a failure.

The closest thing I can attribute to this in my life are my current projects. I’m on holiday, but I’m attempting to blog every day. I already missed a couple of days – so in a way, technically failed. But hey, I’ll keep going. Either way, I’ll be careful not to describe myself as a failure. People fail at things, and that’s ok. As I see it, by considering yourself a failure, you fail yourself. As Burkeman says, being a human failure “is a kind of death”. So let’s talk about death.

 

Chapter 8 – Memento Mori

Now I can’t top Burkeman on his trial with momento mori, for which he travelled to one of Mexico’s most dangerous towns.

As I mentioned yesterday, I listened to part of this audiobook while flying through a thunder storm. The thing is, no-one really believes in her own death. We can go long stretches without considering our own mortality. We do think about death, but usually not the realities of it. Our work, art, wars, everything we do, can be described as immortality projects. We distract ourselves from thoughts of death and use this energy to create something that might outlive us.

As Burkeman’s sources would have it, truly facing mortality beats down external expectations: our fears of embarrassment, failure, and other negatives. He quotes Steve Jobs on remembering that you’re going to die allowing you to avoid the trap of thinking you’ve got something to lose. It’s a virtuous circle: living meaningfully reduces our anxiety about later regretting not having lived meaningfully. Yikes!

Burkeman gives a thought experiment. Imagine you’re old, say 80 years old, and you think back. What will you wish you’d spent more time on, and less time on? I use a similar technique to keep myself moving, ironically enough, towards making my immortality projects. I imagine myself looking back at what I did and what I always meant to do and thinking, “What was I so afraid of?”

 

And on it goes…

In his epilogue, Burkeman thinks about negative capability – a phrase of Keats’. He says:

Sometimes, the most valuable of talents is to be able not to notice the craving for completeness or certainty or comfort, and not to be compelled to follow where it leads.

That which purports to be the answer to the meaning of life, or the answer to happiness, or the way forward, usually isn’t. You have to work that out for yourself.

Burkeman also offers an interim report, so here’s mine. In this book I found several concepts that I try to live by. Expecting the worst, accepting uncertainty, and being wary of the mindless pursuit of certainty are just a few. Trying to take control in these ways is a bit like swimming against the tide.

Life will carry you where it will, and loosening your grip and making decisions to chart your course can help the process along.

Ultimately, we’re never in control, and learning to make the most of it, rather than fighting against it, makes life a lot more enjoyable.

 

Huge thanks to Canongate for involving me in the Nudge Your World project. Click the link for more information and to follow along in the coming months.

#NudgeYourWorld Part III: Who Are You?

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#NudgeYourWorld

 

My journey with Oliver Burkeman’s The Antidote continues…

Missed Part I and Part II? Click on the links to catch up.

 

Chapter 5 – Who’s There?

In Chapter 5 of The Antidote, Burkeman pays Eckhart Tolle a visit. Despite being familiar with the name (who couldn’t name at least one of Oprah’s besties?) I had no idea what he stood for. Turns out he theorises that ‘the self’ does not exist – not in the way that we think it does, at least. He says that we become attached to the voice in our head, that incessant chatterer, and associate with it closely. We think of it as our self – but it isn’t.

Thinking about the ‘self’ is not a new phenomenon. (None of the ideas in this book are. It almost seems like those pre-1900 had it all worked out, to be honest.) Burkeman illustrates another theory by the French 16-17th Century philosopher Descartes – one I’m familiar with from a single undergraduate philosophy module. You know the one: “I think, therefore I am”. It’s The Matrix, basically.

I listened to this chapter on audiobook on a visit to the Fringe, and enjoyed taking in some philosophy on my walk through the streets of Festival-season Edinburgh. Could it be that I’m imagining these thousands of tourists wandering up and down the Royal Mile? That an evil being holds my brain in a jar as I imagine weaving through crowds and dodge sharp-turning taxi cabs?

Entertaining these thoughts made crowd management just a dash more tolerable. It was Hume’s idea that the self is essentially a bundle of perceptions. A touch of annoyance peppered with an urge to move faster. If we can’t define where we begin and end, the crammed train journey home from Edinburgh to Glasgow is but a collection of molecules more tightly pressed together, is it now? Tell that to the guy beside me who is in a blind rage at the lack of platform postage. I guess Tolle is right about one thing, if not the rest: it’s letting our inner chatter out that makes us seem insane.

 

Chapter 6 – The Safety Catch

The day after my visit to the Edinburgh festivals, it was time to hop on a plane – 3 planes – to California. It’s fitting that I reached Chapter 6 on our notions of safety as I packed my suitcase.

Did you know that airport security, the 100ml liquid limit, the shoes off rule, and all the other post-9/11 changes don’t make us any safer? I wasn’t surprised to learn this, but perhaps you will be. The only 2 measures that have helped are locks on cockpit doors and teaching passengers to fight back.

I considered this the next day as I watched the security officer at Glasgow Airport scan and re-scan my husband’s deoderant; not because it was suspicious, but because he hadn’t put the solid gel in a ziplock bag. Like big spending on benefit fraud, I already knew that these security measures convince society at large of their heightened safety. I’ve always had a healthy level of scepticism towards the body scanners and Amber alerts, and as Burkeman points out this security is more a feeling than a reality: a simple cognitive bias. The wonderful illusion of safety!

Burkeman uses these facts to lead in to a discussion of our feelings of security and insecurity in life more generally. In 1957, Alan Watts asserted that the rise in secular and scientific thinking makes us feel less secure, more certain that our lives must be meaningless. I find a great deal of security of science’s explanation of life. Burkeman outlines it as meaningless – we live, we die. In fact, that leaves out our primary motivation in life: to procreate. We don’t die, entirely. We leave half of ourselves behind. We’re here to reproduce, to pass on existence to the next. (Even so, I don’t particularly intend on having children – but more on that some other time, eh?)

The point that I found most appealing in this is that security separates us from life. We assume the separateness of ourselves and of the things we try to control day-to-day. We try to make things go our way, not realising that we can’t control outside factors any more than we can control ourselves. It’s a freeing idea, and one to note while hurtling through a thunderstorm 21 hours after the deoderant screening incident. I’m incredibly calm in turbulence. What can I do to stop the plane from going down? Might as well relax and keep on reading…

So, onward to the Museum of Failure and Momento Mori. More on those tomorrow.

#NudgeYourWorld Part II: On Calm & Goal-setting

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Makeshift Office by robotnic

As previously mentioned, this week I’m a guinea pig for Canongate’s Nudge Your World project. I’m reading The Antidote by Oliver Burkeman – billed as “happiness for people who can’t stand positive thinking” – and trying to live by its learnings.

If you missed it, catch up with Part I.

Chapter 3: The Storm Before the Calm

In this chapter, we take on the Western fascination with Buddhist Zen, calm, and meditation.

I’ve been tasked with living the learnings of this book, but I’d be hard pressed to beat Burkeman’s own test of these theories. As he shares in the book, he took a five-day meditation retreat. Unfortunately the only part that rubbed off on me was his annoyance at having Barbie Girl by Aqua stuck in his head for the first day and a half. YOU’RE WELCOME.

What I did learn is that meditation takes more than a few minutes to achieve. The pursuit of enlightenment is huge; but so is the pursuit of 5 minutes’ silence.

I practice yoga, casually, mostly for exercise. It’s the perfect antidote to sitting hunched up in an office chair and typing all day long. Without getting all woo-woo on you, it’s true that meditation goes hand-in-hand with yoga practice. There is great value in focusing your mind, removing distraction, and letting thoughts float by without judgement.

I’m mindful of not spending too much time on the computer, and of limiting the number of times I hit refresh on my inbox. But sometimes casting it aside and getting my feet on the mat still seems hard. This week I focused on casting that resistance (read: laziness)  aside and getting in at least 10 minutes of ashtanga each day.

I’m not about to run off on retreat, but I’ll tell you what: it’s better than The Little Book of Calm.

 

Chapter 4: Goal Crazy

Burkeman’s next chapter opens with some alternate theories on the reasons for the Everest disaster in 1996. In short, that year more climbers died than in any other year in the mountain’s history. Most of the reasons given have been unsatisfying, but one or two can go a long way to explain a problem in our culture.

Burkeman’s theory? Goal-setting is to blame. He notes that it is our fear of uncertainty that’s killing us. When we’re uncertain, we crave the security of certainty, which leads us to double down on our plans. We see our goals as a road map to our future. If only we can live out those plans, we think, we can live without uncertainty.

The idea of embracing uncertainty is an interesting one – and one I feel I’ve lived out. During my final year of university, my friends and flatmates were caught up in applying for every graduate scheme going; applying for jobs they were and were not qualified for. A pragmatic move to make for the class of post-recession 2009, to be sure. But after spending ages 5-22 in full-time education I was ready to embrace uncertainty and go out into the world and see where the wind took me.

The part that I bristled at was the idea of eschewing goals altogether. Most of the goals and single-minded goal-setting junkies that Burkeman makes examples of suffer from a lack of moderation. As he points out, there’s a lot of misinformation about the virtue of goal-setting out there. On top of that, most of the workplace goal-oriented activities that are prevalent in corporate cultures are also largely useless, putting strain on workers rather than motivating them to work harder and/or smarter.

In the face of these examples, goal-setting seems like a great way to succeed in one venture and likely fail at all others. Too-broad goals are difficult to juggle, and precise ones can take over your life.

Either way, I can definitely chalk my resistance up to the notion of giving up goals. I’ve always been very goal-oriented. Get X grades to get into university. Get on the study abroad programme. Win that award. Get this or that published. Blog every day in August.

The thing is, my goals have always been fairly finite, and have seldom fallen into the trap that Burkeman outlines: withholding happiness until they are achieved.

For me, the dangerous goals are the ones that are applied to arbitrary numbers, like getting 20,000 Twitter followers, or making £50,000 per year; or which – as the author notes – withhold happiness, keeping us from enjoying the journey. I’ll happily lay off those ones.

But I’ll tell you what: I’ll give up on that goal of avoiding uncertainty.